Though I had written about explaining technical things to kids, this is the first time I had to try it in production. At the time of writing this post 16oct2018:10PM EST, Google's well established youtube.com is down thus I got computer from my 4 years old son.
https://twitter.com/TeamYouTube/status/1052373937839980544
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/17/googles-youtube-outage-affected-users-in-us-australia-asia-europe.html
He was angry and slowly moved to crying mode when he understood there issue which his dad cannot fix. Below were our attempts to make him understand the situation.
Attempt 1 - Sympathy
This is my attempt with over confidence that I had writing experience of how to explain tech things to kids. Though the words were not exactly same as we speak mostly in our mother tongue Malayalam at home along with English .
I - Son... you know the youtube is a website which is built and maintained by engineers like us. Your mom also an engineer though not working now. There are some troubles in their computers and those poor guys now will be working hard like me. We have to wait till they fix the issue.
Son - What? youtube is not working. Fix it...
Attempt 2 - Tech explanation
My wife started laughing already. But I did one more attempt.
I - You know...the videos you are seeing in our computer is not actually in our computer. Someone else uploaded those videos into youtube's computer sitting far away. Those youtube's computers are down due to some issues. We cannot do any thing from here, they have to fix it.
Son (with no hope on me) - Can you fix it?
Attempt 3 - Mom's version
Mom - Son we usually call your dad when he is in office. right?
Son - yes
Mom - What if his phone is not working? We keep calling but we cannot speak with him.
Son - yes
Mom - Our phone is good but dad's phone is not working. Think youtube is dad's phone and is not working.
Son (sad) - ok. Lets sleep.
No comments:
Post a Comment